Introduction

The Third Man appears after the conclusion of World War
II and explores the complex world of postwar Vienna, a city
fragmented and controlled by the Allied forces. Graham Greene
himself had worked as something of an agent for the British during
the war, and so he brought a certain amount of first hand knowledge
to the project; in addition, Greene did on-site research in Vienna.
Eventually, Carol Reed's film was made from a treatment written by
Greene in 1948. While Greene knew he was writing a film, he first
constructed The Third Man in the form of a noir novella; as
Greene notes in the preface, his novella "was never meant to read,
but only to be seen" (7). There are several important alterations
that occurred through the process of transforming the novella, and
as Greene admits in the preface to the published version of the
novella, most are for the better. Greene explains his process by
saying that in order to construct the screenplay and present fully
realized characters as well as "mood" and "atmosphere," "[o]ne must
have more material than one needs to draw on" (8). Following
Greene's own methodology, I will be occasionally going back to
Greene's novella as a way of contextualizing certain scenes from
the film, and thus viewing the film almost as an excerpt of a more
extensive narrative.

Before focusing on the details of the film itself, let us
consider the context of the project's evolution. By the end of the
World War II, many of the most prominent writers of the modernist
period had died or, at the least, seen the height of their careers
pass. In England at this time, it is clear that not only had
modernism—or the various modernisms that have since been grouped
together under this rubric—moved toward a close, but also an often
active distrust of the techniques and methods associated with it
began to surface in the work of the writers that dominated this
period. As Malcolm Bradbury declares in a chapter on this period,
"Modernism was over, even tainted". Bradbury goes on to note that
modernism was "already being historicized, defined, monumentalized,
given its name and structure" (268). In other words, what might be
more precisely called modernisms was being shaped into something
more unified and monolithic in retrospect, something authors of the
next period could identify and respond against. Attitudes toward
the period aside, it is clear from Bradbury's characterization of
the critical response to modernism that it was no longer possible
to continue writing in this vein and be considered a writer of
truly new fiction.

Against this backdrop, it is also important to realize that not
only was modernism becoming out-of-date, if you will, but because
of the circumstances of World War II—the Holocaust, the birth of
the nuclear age, the vast destruction wrought throughout Europe, to
be brief—the ideological implications of its methods and techniques
raised very serious questions following the War for those viewing
modernism in this newly homogenized version. Now, the idea of using
radically abstract or experimental aesthetic forms to shape
personal and public experience offered very serious ramifications.
Frank Kermode, looking back at the work of W. B. Yeats, whose
"Second Coming" can be seen as an exemplar of Modernist fears of
chaos and its frequent desire to regain control over existence
through form, makes a point "more often noticed than explained:
totalitarian theories of form matched or reflected . . .
totalitarian politics" (108). Likewise, this too is the period in
which Theodor Adorno famously remarked "No Poetry after Auschwitz,"
a phrase Bradbury interprets—I believe rightly—to suggest he was
"conscious that the aestheticization of life might breed the evil
in history" (269). It is not going too far to say that some
modernist literary ideas could easily be associated with political
views of the right. After all, Pound had infamously supported
Mussolini's regime, Yeats—according to Kermode—dabbled with
authoritarian politics (106), Wyndham Lewis wrote his unfortunate
book about Hitler, and Lawrence wrote a novel, The Plumed
Serpent (1926), that, according to William York Tindall,
fascist endorser Rolf Gardiner called "a...

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